Re-thinking the role of nationality in Malawian primary school education for cosmopolitan citizenship

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT : The pervasiveness of global interconnectedness has necessitated the re-imagination of thebreadth and scope of citizenship. No longer should citizenship conceptualisation be restrictedto the nation-state. There is arguable consensus of the normative necessity to cultivatecosmopolitan citizenship whose scope of duties transcends national borders. However, thequestion of what the form and substance of cosmopolitan citizenship should be remainscontested. A given conception of cosmopolitanism directly informs the nature of educationfor democratic citizenship. The prevalent model of cosmopolitan citizenship outlaws nationalparticularism ostensibly for being inherently inimical to the impartiality of universalism. Theunderlying logic is that equal concern for all people of the world is achievable only throughimpartiality over all particularism. There has however not been much research about thenormative implications, especially for developing nations, of an impartiality that necessarilyextinguishes national belonging. The context of developing nations demands a fundamentalre-think of the potentiality of an exclusively impartial cosmopolitanism for suchcosmopolitanism risks entrenching global inequality.The removal of Malawian History from the primary school curriculum and of mother-tongueinstruction for the first four years of primary education has normative motivations andimplications. This dissertation argues that the systematic diminishing of the role ofnationality through the removal of national History from the curriculum in Malawi, andadoption of English as the sole medium of instruction in primary education, are advancing aproblematic cosmopolitan citizenship model that is incompatible with ideal human equality.Such a cosmopolitanism undermines the normative value of mother-tongue instruction. Thecosmopolitanism also regards national history as inherently promoting parochialism and thusinherently inhibitive of universalist cosmopolitan duties.Building on Seyla Benhabib's (1992; 2011) idea of the concrete (differences) standpoint ofuniversalism of human equality, as opposed to the general (commonality) standpoint ofuniversalism, this dissertation argues that since nationality hosts people's sources ofconcreteness, nationality has normative value and ideal cosmopolitanism is thereforeessentially a duality of the particular and the universal. The two are mutually dependent andregulating ideals such that supplanting one for the other undermines human equality. Anessentialist universalism is problematic because by excluding subjectivity and particularism, it denies normative value to what individuates the peoples of the world as the concrete (notmerely generic) human beings that they are.The dissertation further argues that the idea of the detached transcendent self for whom socialrelations are not constitutive of being is flawed because it ignores the care he or she receivesfrom others to achieve autonomy. Achievement of autonomy is dependent on the relationsand institutions of care-giving typified by such elements of nationality as language, history,common culture and territory. With respect to democracy, nationality, though often assuminga background role, is the principle that makes civic patriotism possible. Civic patriotismcannot sustain democracy without continually drawing from nationality.The dissertation argues that ideal authenticity-oriented education ought not to avoidsubjectivity or else the education will lose meaningfulness to the people. Education shouldacknowledge that learners as citizens share a common fate through nationality. In education,the marginalisation of the national subjective for citizenship in favour of exclusiveimpartiality, amounts to tacit assimilation because the ostensible objective impartialityprejudicially marginalises valid moral perspectives of the world's other peoples.In Malawi, despite being the motivation and catalyst of colonial resistance, nationality wasabused in the independence era. Currently, there are tokenistic commitments to nationalitydue to a lack of political will coupled with the prevalence of neoliberalism. Globalinterconnectedness, which necessitates and enables the imagination, of cultivation ofcosmopolitan duties is itself characteristically inhered by Eurocentric particularism,neoliberalism and inequality in the representation of global people's particular interests.Consequently, the marginalisation of the local promotes attitudes that regard local languageand local epistemologies as subaltern. In such a context, mother-tongue instruction is strippedof its normative value. National History is regarded as advancing particularity, and narrowmindedness. However, particularism is an indispensable component of ideal universalism.Further, there are valid relational normative conceptualisations of human nature besidesindividual-centrism that found a relational (and not individual-centric) universalism.This research contributes towards the re-imagination of an education for citizenship thatchallenges the prevailing global homogenisation of the unprivileged and unrepresentedepistemologies and voices, marginalised on account of their otherness, ultimately compelledto assimilate involuntarily into the mainstream in the name of impartiality of equality.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University